At 09:48 PM 6/3/96 -0400, Avi Freedman wrote:

I think portable wrt the NICs may be:

(1) The 'Portable' vs. 'Non-Portable' marker on the ISP IP request template

(2) The 'Portable' vs. 'Non-Portable' marker on whois queries that says:

ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE

Now, as to what it *means*, it probably means that if you asked the NIC in question, they'd say 'touch luck' if you wanted to contest a SWIPping away from you of the space, I suppose.

Of course, since the NIC refuses to delegate > /16s worth of in-addr.arpa, unless you have a <= /16 from your provider, you're not going to get useful in-addr.arpa from your old provider if they don't want you to.

Avi

It would appear, then, that a better definition for 'portable' needs to come in existence. Which is why I particularly liked draft-ietf-cidrd-addr-ownership-07.txt. After re-reading draft-hubbard-registry-guidelines-01.txt, its not readily apparent what 'portability' really means; I'm not so sure that it was the goal of the authors to define portability. It does state, however, that: [snip] 2) Routability: Distribution of globally unique Internet addresses in a hierarchical manner, permitting the routing scalability of the addresses. This scalability is necessary to ensure proper operation of Internet routing, although it must be stressed that routability is in no way guaranteed with the allocation or assignment of IPv4 addresses. [snip] Hence my earlier comment. The topic is discussed in more detail in draft-ietf-cidrd-addr-ownership-07.txt: [snip] Since the Internet does not constrain its topology (or allowed topology changes), we can either have address ownership for everyone or a routable Internet, but not both, or we need to develop and deploy new mechanisms (e.g., by decoupling the address owned by the end users from those used by the Internet routing, and provide mechanisms to translate between the two). In the absence of new mechanisms, if we have address ownership ("portable" addresses) for everyone, then the routing overhead will lead to a breakdown of the routing system resulting in a fragmented (partitioned) Internet. Alternately, we can have a routable Internet, but without address ownership ("portable" addresses) for everyone. [snip] - paul